Professedly a remake of 1960’s Where the Boys Are, Hy Averback’s final film as director, Where the Boys Are ’84, does retain the simple premise: Four college girls drive to Fort Lauderdale for spring break. Whereas the original was a bubbly comedy with a serious streak of date rape painted across its middle, ’84 dumps that paint on the floor — and flings it on the walls and ceiling — as an all-out, balls-out, R-rated parrrrrtyyyyy!

So why isn’t it any fun?

The short answer may boil down to a combo of “producer Allan Carr” and “cocaine,” but hey, you’re here already, so let’s talk.

Among our four leading ladies, top-billed Lisa Hartman (then on TV’s Knots Landing) is such a pure cypher as the studious one, she may as well be invisible. A lemon-mouthed Lorna Luft doesn’t stray far from her Grease 2 role, while For Your Eyes Only’s Lynn-Holly Johnson runs hornier than the loot from an Africa safari. Finally, in her first movie since 1977’s Record City, Wendy Schaal plays the stuffy straight arrow. Only one of the women exudes true sex appeal, and here’s a hint: It’s Schaal.

Individually and/or collectively, their characters pounce from man to man while bouncing from party to party. One is arrested for driving drunk. Drugs are taken. A gigolo is bedded. A “hot bod” contest entails suggestive motions with a sizable cucumber. And in a scene that actually provoked mild controversy at the time, the girls take a moment of respite to take turns engaging in foreplay with a blow-up doll.

With debauchery but no discernible fun, Where the Boys Are ’84 hovers just above zero. Averback (Chamber of Horrors) doesn’t quite build a story as much he does stack scenes atop one another until all the songs needed for a soundtrack album had found a home. Due to that — and especially T&A abounding from anonymous actresses — Carr’s final comeback attempt post-Can’t Stop the Music finishes as little more than a massively overfunded Hardbodies. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Crash Course, NBC’s teen-dream melding of Moving Violations and Summer School, pulls in with the shakiest of premises: Hamilton High School’s sports program is endangered due to tanking grades in driver’s education. The principal (Ray Walston, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) gives the class’ blithering, scaredy-cat teacher (Charles Robinson, TV’s Night Court) six weeks to steer it into shape, with hired muscle (and sass) from Jackée Harry (TV’s 227): “This is supposed to be driver’s ed, not a Bananarama audition!”

The crazy classroom comes culled almost exclusively from hit sitcoms of the time, including:
• Mr. Belvedere’s Rob Stone as an Ivy League-bound senior, if only he can pass the class;
• soap star Brian Bloom and his eyebrows as a juvenile delinquent with two failed tries;
• Who’s the Boss?’s Alyssa Milano as a transfer student enrolling against her mother’s wishes;
• Family Ties’ Tina Yothers as the not-so-great Santini, daughter of a cement truck driver;
• The Wonder Years’ Olivia d’Abo as the token hot foreign exchange student;
• and eventual Jurassic Park employee BD Wong as the token Asian who raps.

Somehow, every one of these otherwise functional young humans treats the automobile as alien and Gordian as performing open-heart surgery using a construction backhoe while on the nose of the Space Shuttle at launch. Accelerator versus brake, curb versus street, left versus right — never before has a movie contained so many scenes of motorists letting go of the wheel and shrieking “AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!” in the face of opposing traffic, fire hydrants and fruit stands. To quote Bloom’s tough-talkin’ Riko, “There’s a lot you don’t know, diaper head.”

Bustin’ Loose helmer Oz Scott navigates this flat, vanilla-pudding mayhem with all the story intricacies of a Trapper Keeper. In place of jokes are a Wang Chung shout-out, a clumsy Chariots of Fire bit and Dick Butkus in a chicken suit. Harvey Korman (Munchies) says it all when his sabotage-minded faculty member yells at himself in frustration, “Why do you do things like this? Why me?”

Because a paycheck’s a paycheck, I guess. Movie drinking games are stupid, but if you were to do one during Crash Course, you’d have a Cadillac-sized liver for imbibing at each rap number, mention of “symbiosis” and usage of a rubber-plunger dart gun. You might even experience the tremors before the big closing song, “We Be Drivin’.” I not be kiddin’. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.